Insert standard disclaimer here, you’re not my doctor, this is not medical advice, blah blah.
Saw my eye doc today for tired eyes when reading. I thought I needed a new scrip, but he says my current ones are fine, but he’s rather concerned about my thyroid function. I forget what he called it, but apparently my upper eyelids don’t always cover the tops of my irises. Weird.
So I’m seeing my GP on Friday for some blood tests.
So if this is a thyroid problem, what can I expect? Is this a medication for the rest of my life deal? Can medication/treatment fix it for good? Are there any crappy side effects that I’m looking at? (Medications make me gain weight at the drop of a hat, so this part is a serious concern for me.)
Off the top of my head (I am not a doctor yadda yadda etc) it sounds like Graves’ disease, a primary cause of overactive thyroid. There are a variety of treatment options ranging from drug therapy to surgery to radioactive iodine therapy.
I also believe my mother has it and have been trying for four months to get her to see a GP with no success.
Good luck to you, and kudos for minding your health.
IANAD, yadda yadda. I have a friend who was diagnosed w/ Graves probably 10 years ago. She did the radioactive iodine therapy (to destroy the overactive thyroid tissue) and will be on Synthroid for the rest of her life. IIRC, she’s had to have her dosage tweaked a couple of times. Other than that, no long-lasting consequences or anything. She lives a perfectly normal life.
If it’s Graves, I will just have to laugh. I was treated a couple years back for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Apparently my immune system can’t get anything right…
Just curious if anyone else can tell me something. Tomorrow seems like a long way off right now.
Is Synthroid known to cause weight gain? Are there other possibilities here? My eyes haven’t felt buggy at all this morning, so I’m hoping there’s something else at work, here. Sigh.
If you are hypothyroid, normalizing the function with synthroid can actually help you lose weight. If the dosage is correct, I don’t think you ought to have any side effects at all.
I have a hyoactive thyroid. The idea behind the radioactive iodine treatment for a hyperactive thyroid is to kill off a bunch of your thyroid to make it hypoactive, then bring things back up to the right level with thyroid hormone (e.g., Synthroid). (My sister had this treatment to get rid of thyroid cancer.)
Symptoms of hypoactive thyroid include weight gain, dry skin and hair, fatigue, trouble regulating body temperature (feeling cold). Taking thyroid hormone can reverse these so you’re back to baseline.
ETA: Marty Feldman had Graves’ Disease, so you’re in good company
If you are hypothyroid (you don’t make enough), then adding thyroid should make it easier to control your weaight. But if your thyroid is overactive, then reducing it should reduce your basal metabolism and make it harder.
Please note that having Graves’ will not necessarily cause you to look like Marty Feldman. ISTR he had a botched corrective operation that made his eyes worse.
As mentioned above, an alternative to iodine treatment is to take thyroid blocking drugs. I think this is more viable when you have a low level of hyperthyroidism, but my understanding is that it is somewhat easier to manage than thyroid replacement via Synthroid et al.
Not sure about the second part of this. Whether you are adding or reducing thyroid, once you reach normal levels your weight should not be affected. In theory, at least.
My BIL has hypothyroidism and seems to have trouble maintaining his weight. Apparently it is difficult to get the dosages right.
OTOH, I have hyperthyroidism and have not had any trouble keeping my weight steady after finding the correct dosage of thyroid blocking drug (Methimazole).
I had Hodgkin’s too. If you had any radiation treatments to the neck area, or possibly just from the chemotherapy, you may have thyroid damage. My thyroid was pretty much destroyed as a result of treatments.
I’m on Levothyroxine, the generic version of Synthroid. I feel great! The doctor just has to do a simple blood test every six weeks or so while he zeros in on the correct dosage. Eventually, he’ll get it to the point where you’ll be on a stable dosage and only need it double checked every six months to a year or if you start to feel like you have too much or too little energy. The pills are small, and cheap. It costs me $5 a month or so for them. I will take one a day the rest of my life. No side effects that I can tell.
No radiation. The only thing they did to my neck was remove and biopsy a node cluster just above the collarbone (and just under the skin… if they got deep enough to hit thyroid they did something wrong, and I certainly don’t think they did. You can’t even see the scar.).
My oncologist never mentioned thyroid damage as a potential side effect of chemo, either. Although he did mention possible heart, liver, or lung damage. Hell, he even mentioned the risk for infertility (low, and AFAIC irrelevant anyway). I came away clean… really I had the easiest case of Hodgkin’s you could hope to get, assuming you’re crazy enough to hope to get Hodgkin’s.
Anyway, I suppose I’ll find out what this is soon enough. Anyone know how long it takes to get the lab results back? If it’s more than a couple hours I’ll probably have to wait til Monday to hear, and that would suck.
People should get their thyroids checked if there are any problems. I have a good doctor, and came to him with palpatations. He tested me and I am hypo.
I hadn’t known the symptoms or I could’ve diagnosed it msyelf; fatigue (I ahd to sit downa fter walking three blocks), hair kept falling out, weight gain, depressed, no sex drive.
I started taking levo two days ago(50 mcg) and I already feel more energetic!
I doubt it takes very long to run the labs, but many (most?) doctors offices send their bloodwork to a third-party company for testing so it takes a couple of days.
So when do you get results? At least you know going in that - either way - there are highly standardized and effective treatments.
I’ve been on and off levothyroxine most of my adult life, but in the last 4-5 years I had to start taking it all the time. I had to have my dose upped about a year ago. They’re a pain (pills), but it’s so much better than leaving the problem untreated.
Monday or Tuesday. The eye fatigue comes and goes – I haven’t really had a problem all day today – but the fatigue was just crippling yesterday. I’m not sure if that had something to do with going to the gym, but I was absolutely wiped afterward.
Dunno. The more I read about Graves the more it freaks me out. I read one anecdote about someone who went through iodine radiation therapy and three years after they nuked her thyroid she started having serious eye problems. Or thyroidectomy, which risks vocal chord damage. Either of those things would be career-ending for me.
My understanding is that the exopthalmia (increased eye prominence) symptom of Graves is not directly related to the hyperthyroidism, so managing your thyroid levels does not prevent the eye issues. It seems like this is not very well understood, or else my doctors are bad at explaining it.
If you have severe eye problems (e.g., double vision), surgical correction is possible. I can only speak for my own case, but my doctors have not presented this (severe eye problems) as a likely scenario for me. An acquaintance with Graves had this procedure and it went smoothly.
I don’t know how receptive you are to supplements, but … I have real problems with eye strain/fatigue. I discovered several years ago that bilberry supplements help tremendously with that problem. I get inferior results from the supplements that are mainly lutein with only a bit of bilberry in them. I can’t promise you that they’d work for you, but trying them is up to you. And it’s possible that if it does help, the ones with mostly lutein may work better for you. I don’t know. Neither kind costs very much, and I can’t see how taking them could cause a problem. Today’s multivitamins have lutein added, just smaller quantities.
I had eye surgery to end double vision (which began following my second “closed-head” (now called brain) injury. It had the fortunate side effect of ending the sometimes blinding head pain I’d had for more than four years between the second injury and the surgery.
I still have a slight problem with my eyes not quite focusing together automatically, but I’d had several years of therapy with prisms (and prisms built into my glasses) in the interim. If my eyes get very tired, the vision can still go double, but my learned reflex for focusing them still works just fine. The one disadvantage I’ve had from having one eye muscle shortened is that I can no longer cross my eyes to see the kind of 3D images, or other sorts of image illusions that require you to do that.
Although there seem to be a number of similarities in our situations, I’m quite sure I don’t have Graves, and my eyes are still set in my head exactly the same as they’ve always been - and they don’t protrude at all. I can understand how scary this all must be. Another problem I have is really severe arthritis in both thumbs, but I refused surgery to remove one joint from each (and theoretically end the pain) because the doctor couldn’t tell me whether having it done would impact my ability to play keyboard instruments.
I do wish you the very best of good luck with treatment, whatever is needed, and whatever you decide to do about it.
I, too, am not a doctor, but have been reading up on Graves. As I understand it, the root cause of the hyperthyroid is the thyroid being attacked by the immune system. The eye prominence is also caused by an immune system attack. So taking medications to adjust the thyroid horomone levels helps with the hyperthroid, but does not stop the immune systems effects on the eye tissues.
Another case of Graves over here. I was finally diagnosed about nine years ago, when I had twittered, twitched and fidgeted my way down to 112 pounds.
My doc got suspicious and sent me to an Endo who ordered blood work. The result: “Check again…are you sure you’re still breathing?”
I went on tapazole and propranolol (going by memory from awhile ago, but I’m pretty sure those were the meds) for awhile until my levels were brought a little closer to normal, and then they sent me for radioiodine treatment.
Since then it’s just been a matter of keeping an eye on the issue. I was on synthroid for a couple of years, but I’ve been in non-medicated balance for about four years now (and am up to much more human-like 178 pounds).
Bottom line, you don’t know what the treatment is going to do to you, but it’s going to be a hell of a lot better than the disease.
